# Why are young black men in the US 21X more likely to be killed by police than young white men? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [October 13, 2014, 1:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-young-black-men-in-the-us-21x-more-likely-to-be-killed-by-police-than-young-white-men/701156 "2014-10-13T01:48:56Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 58
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [October 13, 2014, 6:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-young-black-men-in-the-us-21x-more-likely-to-be-killed-by-police-than-young-white-men/701156/58 "2014-10-13T18:03:41Z")
And of course if anyone objects to the data provided in the OP, that illustrates another problem: there’s no comprehensive database of people killed by the police. Everybody from Nate Silver to Radley Balko to The Daily Show has weighed in on this lately. It’s transparently absurd, but there you go. > [@Cheesesteak](#): > > The police are 1/75th as likely to kill a young black man as a murderer. You’re not contradicting anything I said. _You_ wrote that, somehow, a black murder victim and a black man who is killed by the police are both “in a situation where another person feels that committing homicide is the best course of action.” A death by a murder and death by cop aren’t supposed to be similar at all, so why are you comparing them? Someone who is killed by another citizen is a murder victim. Someone who is killed by a police officer is dead at the hand of the government, a person who is trained and trusted with a great deal of power to uphold the law. If you’re more likely to a be murder victim, that has jack squat to do with the likelihood that the police will kill you. Getting back to the OP, I wrote this in another thread on this subject last week: > [@What exactly do cops have to fear from black males?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exactly-do-cops-have-to-fear-from-black-males/700819/4): > > It’s not just cops. Our society strongly associates black men with violent crime, and unfortunately the police and legal systems play into that: black people are more likely than white people to be arrested for crimes even if blacks and whites commit them at similar rates, and they get sentenced more often and more harshly. There’s evidence that judgment against black people begins far earlier than that, too, as they are more likely to be suspended from school, too. Crazy as it sounds, it’s a phenomenon people have started calling the preschool to prison pipeline. ([You can read details and cites for several of those points here.](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/08/broken_windows_policing_deaths_racism_in_chokeholds_arrests_and_convictions.html) [And here.](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/08/racial_bias_in_criminal_justice_whites_don_t_want_to_reform_laws_that_harm.html)) And it goes without saying that cops often have to deal with criminals and find themselves in dangerous or potentially dangerous situations. So the answer is that it doesn’t have a lot to do with police. It doesn’t mean every cop or even most cops are racist and it doesn’t mean all of these things are intentional. In fact part of the problem is that a lot of these biases can’t be conscious. It’s about society in general, and while individual incidents might not mean much, it’s easy to see that there’s a pattern to these kinds of things. So when there are systemic problems with policing, in the broader scheme that reflects the society the police are a part of. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-young-black-men-in-the-us-21x-more-likely-to-be-killed-by-police-than-young-white-men/701156)._